Drupal

"Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) and Content Management framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License." - Wikipedia

This article describes how to setup Drupal and configure Apache, MySQL or PostgreSQL, PHP, and Postfix to work with it. It is assumed that you have some sort of LAMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) or LAPP (Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP) server already setup.

Installation

Arch repositories

If PHP version is less than 5.2.0, Find the line with ;extension=json.so and uncomment it by removing the ";" from the beginning of the line if necessary. If no such line is found, add it to the [PHP] section of the file.

For Drupal 7, enable a PDO extension for your database. For MySQL, the line extension=pdo_mysql.so should be uncommented.

Find the line beginning with open_basedir =. Add the Drupal install directories, /usr/share/webapps/drupal/ and /var/lib/drupal/. /srv/http/ can be removed if you do not intend to use it.

Edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:

If your webserver is dedicated to Drupal, find the line DocumentRoot "/srv/http" and change it to the Drupal install directory, i.e.DocumentRoot "/usr/share/webapps/drupal", then find the section that starts with "<Directory "/srv/http">" and change /srv/http to the Drupal install directory, /usr/share/webapps/drupal. In the same section, make sure it includes a line "AllowOverride All" to enable the clean URL's.

Finally comment out the deny from all line of the /usr/share/webapps/drupal/.htaccess file to enable httpd access and restart Apache (httpd).

Manual install

Download the latest package from http://drupal.org and extract it. Move the folders to Apache's htdocs folder. Open a web browser, and navigate to [localhost localhost]. Follow the on-screen instructions.

Installing GD

You may need the GD library for your Drupal installation. First install the php-gd package.
Edit /etc/php/php.ini. Find the line with ;extension=gd.so and uncomment it by removing the ";". If no such line is found, add it to the [PHP] section of the file.
Restart Apache (httpd).

Installing Postfix

In order to send e-mails with Drupal, you will need to install Postfix. Drupal uses e-mails for account verification, password recovery, etc. First install postfix.

Edit Postfix configuration file /etc/postfix/main.cf as needed. All that you should have to do is change the hostnames under "Internet Host and Domain Names" myhostname = hostname1

Start the Postfix service: # systemctl start postfix.

Send a test e-mail to yourself: mail myusername@localhost. Enter a subject, some words in the body, then press Template:Keypress to exit and send the letter. Wait 10 seconds, and then type mail to check your mail. If you've gotten it, excellent.

Make sure port 25 is fowarded if you have a router so that mails can be sent to the Internet at large

Edit the file /etc/php/php.ini. Find the line that starts with, ;sendmail_path="" and change it to sendmail_path="/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i"

Restart the Apache web server.

Tips and tricks

Scheduling with Cron

Drupal recommends running cron jobs hourly. Cron can be executed from the browser by visiting [localhost/cron localhost/cron]. It is also possible to run cron via script by copying the appropriate file from the "scripts" folder into /etc/cron.hourly and making it executable.

Xampp Compatibility

The 5.x and 6.x series of Drupal do not support PHP 5.3, and as a result are incompatible with the latest release of Xampp. Currently, the last Drupal-compatible version of Xampp is 1.7.1.

httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName

You should edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.
In that file find the line that looks similar to

#ServerName www.example.com:80

Uncomment it (remove # from the front) and adjust the address as needed. Restart httpd:

# systemctl restart httpd

Setup page is not the initial page when accessing localhost

In this situation, you should navigate in your /srv directory and look for the drupal folder (most probably it will be in the http directory). Then edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.
and look for a line starting with DocumentRoot and change the path with that folder's path (for example DocumentRoot "/srv/http/drupal") and also find another line starting with <Directory and set the same path there as well. Restart httpd.

Setup page does not start and shows HTTP ERROR 500

This may be because Drupal needs the json.so extension to be activated in your /etc/php/php.ini.
Just uncomment in /etc/php/php.ini the line: